How to take orders on Instagram without a website.

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Instagram has no order button. Here is what people use instead.

If you sell cakes, prints, knitwear, alterations or anything made to order, Instagram is probably where your customers find you. It is also where they try to order, and Instagram gives you nothing built for that — no form, no order button, no way to ask for a date and an address. So sellers improvise, and most of the improvisations lose orders.

This guide compares the four ways small businesses actually take orders on Instagram, then walks through setting the account up so orders arrive complete. It works whether or not you have a website, and most of it works whatever tool you choose. Full disclosure: we make one of those tools, Rapid Cart. It is one option among four below, and the last section is about it; skip that if you already have something that works.

1 · The options

Four ways to take orders on Instagram

1. In the DMs

“DM to order” is where almost everyone starts, because it costs nothing and needs no setup. The price shows up later: every order is a conversation, the details you need arrive over five messages instead of one, and the request from 11pm last Tuesday is now somewhere above a friend’s meme. Fine at two or three orders a month. Past roughly one a week, it is where orders go to get lost.

2. Instagram Shop

Instagram’s own selling feature. You build a product catalogue in Meta’s Commerce Manager, tag products in posts, and customers buy from a product page. It is built for a fixed list of items with a fixed price and stock: twenty designs of the same tote bag. It is not built for “a chocolate cake for sixteen, for Saturday, with a name on it”. There is nowhere for the customer to say any of that. Whether checkout happens inside Instagram or sends people to your website also depends on your country, so check what Instagram offers where you are before planning around it.

3. A form

A Google Form or similar, linked from your bio. Free, and a real improvement on DMs: you decide the questions, and the answers land in a spreadsheet. The costs are the twenty minutes of setup, a link that looks like a spam URL, a customer who may have to sign into Google to attach a photo, and a spreadsheet that does not know which orders you have accepted, declined or finished. That last one matters more than it sounds once there are thirty rows.

4. An order link

A page at its own address that asks the customer for exactly what you need — what they want, when, where, their budget, a photo — and sends it to you as one complete order you can accept or decline. The customer needs no account. This is what Rapid Cart is, and there are other tools in the same shape. The point of the category is that the order arrives as an order, not as a chat.

2 · Before you set anything up

Decide what an order has to contain

Whatever you choose, it will only ask for what you told it to ask for. Write the list first. For most made-to-order businesses it is the same nine things: what they want, the date and time, collection or delivery with the address, their budget or your price, the occasion and any wording, allergies or dietary needs, a reference photo, their contact details, and how they found you. The baker’s guide explains each one, and why skipping any of them costs three messages later.

The one to be strict about is the date. Every question you do not ask up front is a question you will ask in the DMs, which puts you back where you started.

3 · The setup

Make Instagram send every order to one place

Instagram only makes a link clickable in three places: the bio, a Story sticker, and a direct message. Links in captions and comments are plain text, and nobody retypes a URL from a caption. So the whole job is putting your order link in those three places and telling people it is there.

The bio link

The most valuable line of text you own. A bio can hold several links now; put the order link first and name it plainly — “Order here” beats a bare address. Then rewrite the bio itself so it answers the questions you get asked twenty times a week: what you make, your lead time, where you are and how people get it, a starting price, one friendly line. The last line is “Order through the link below”, not “DM to order”.

A Story with the link sticker, saved as a highlight

Post a Story that says how to order and add the link sticker to it. Then save it to a highlight called “Order” so it sits under your bio permanently instead of disappearing after a day. This is the place a customer looks second, after the bio, and a highlight answers them without a message.

A saved reply for the DMs

You will still get “Hi, can I order a cake?” in the DMs, because people do not read bios. Instagram lets a business account save replies and insert them with a shortcut. Save one — warm, two lines, ending in the link — and answer every enquiry with it in one tap. The order still arrives complete, and the DM stays a conversation. This one change is most of the difference between the DM way and the link way.

A pinned post

Pin a post to the top of your grid that explains how to order: lead time, prices from, and “link in bio”. It is the one place a new visitor reads before anything else, and it stops the same question arriving on every new post.

The caption line

End every post about something orderable with the same short line: “To order, use the link in my bio.” Not a URL, since it would not be clickable anyway; the same eight words every time, so followers learn where to go.

4 · Pre-orders

Taking pre-orders and running a drop

Seasonal bakes, a limited run, a market you want to bake for in advance: pre-orders are the same setup with a window on it. Announce the dates in a post and a Story a week ahead. Open orders on the day you said, through the same link. Say how many you will take and stop when you get there — a note in your bio, “Christmas orders now closed”, saves you declining thirty requests one by one. For anything with a date attached, take a deposit before you block the slot; the wording that works is in the five policies worth stating up front.

5 · Running it

Once the orders arrive

• Reply within a few hours. Custom orders go to whoever answers first far more often than to whoever is cheapest.
• Confirm the price and the date in writing before you buy a single ingredient or cut a single piece of fabric. If you need to work the price out first, the costing guide does the arithmetic.
• Tell them yes or no. An enquiry with no answer is a customer who thinks you are still thinking about it.
• Keep the status somewhere that is not your memory. Requested, accepted, ready, collected. A spreadsheet column or a dashboard — anything but the chat.
• Ask for a photo at the party. Customer photos of your work in use are the best posts you will ever make, and they cost one polite message.

6 · If you want the link version

How Rapid Cart does it

This section is about our tool. Everything above works without it.

• Sign up with your email or Google account. Your order page is created from your name, at an address like rapidcart.co/o/annas-bakery. There is no setup to get through.
• Add a line or two about what you sell, your lead time and prices from. This is the bio formula above, on the page itself.
• Put the link in your bio, in an “Order” highlight, and in a saved reply. Download the QR code for your packaging or market table.
• Customers open it, fill in one form — what, when, where, budget, photo, notes — and send. No account, no app. They get a reference and a tracking page.
• You get an email and a dashboard entry per order. Accept, decline or mark it ready with one tap, and the customer is told automatically. Every message about the order stays with the order.

Questions, or a way of taking orders on Instagram we have missed? We would genuinely like to hear it: info@rapidcart.co